Your Call Is Important To Us

I’m on tour but I’m also on hold–with Customer Relations at a MAJOR car rental agency where they have utterly tuneless music and a cheerful computerized woman’s voice that comes on periodically and thanks me for my patience. Believe me, I am not patient. I am annoyed. I spent ten minutes on hold before I reached an agent. She then sent me to Customer Relations, but not to anyone in particular. Instead she shipped me off into another level of voice mail hell where that cheery dame started out by warning me that I might have a twenty minute wait. She also keeps telling me that I could do what I want to do on-line twenty-four hours a day, but that is NOT true. I’ve checked the on-line options and NONE of them do what I want to do which is speak to someone, as in A HUMAN BEING.

According to her, they "care about my opinion." They also hope that at the end of my call that I will stay on the line and give them feedback about their service today. Believe me, they will not want to hear THAT opinion which may entail my having to use a good many very ungrandmotherly words, particularly since the purpose of the call was to tell them about bad service to begin with. Now, however, this has turned into a grudge match. They figure that if they leave me here stewing long enough, I will give up and go away, but I have news for them. I am NOT hanging up. I am burning up my cell phone minutes with wild abandon. And by the end of this call, I’ll be able to tell EXACTLY how many minutes I spent on hold and I will list that number in this BLOG! (The final VMH [voice mail hell] score ended up being one hour, four minutes and fifty-three seconds to be absolutely exact.)

Fortunately, however, I’m a woman and can do more than one thing at a time which is why I’m writing this blog while I sit on hold. As my mother would have said, "Strike while the iron is hot." I know she said that a lot of the time, but now that I’ve written it down, I’m not at all sure of its linguistic origins. My mother grew up on a farm. When she said that to me, I always imagined it had something to do with shoeing horses. I know I could google it and find out for sure, but sometimes I prefer to cling to what I think is true. What if I find out the real source and it’s not nearly as colorful as I’ve always pictured. (Some of you are probably googling that phrase before going on to the next sentence. Like it or not, I have no doubt I’ll have my "trite phrase explanations" landing in my mailbox from multiple correspondents.)

The point is, even if I don’t know where the phrase came from, I do know what it means and what my mother meant when she said it: Don’t wait wait around. If you need to do something, do it now. If you’re upset with someone, then talk to them about it while you’re still "hot under the collar" which is also something my mother used to say. And so, I am calling the car rental company TODAY and I’m doing it while I’m still . . .well, "mad as a wet hen." Oh, my! I really am channeling my mother today. Obviously, all those times when she thought I wasn’t listening, I really was paying attention!

So back to the car rental company. We’re on tour. With two book tours a year, we rent a lot of cars from this same company which supposedly makes us members of one of their "elite" levels of service. (I was going to put the car company’s name in this blog, but my husband doesn’t want their corporate attorneys descending on us en masse, especially when we have no voice-mail hell of our own in which to put them.)

We are on tour. And it’s going very well. Most of the events are booked to capacity. Some of them are Standing Room Only. That’s all very, very gratifying, but it turns out getting there isn’t half the fun. So far we’ve rented two cars. (Three actually, but more on that later.) In both cases we stepped off the plane to find that the car we ordered, the one in our "profile," wasn’t there.

On tour I do speeches. And book signings. In both cases, I need to be able to talk to people. I don’t smoke. I’m allergic to smoke. Our "profile" says non-smoking vehicles only. In both cases the vehicles we were given reeked of smoke. (One actually had a cloud of little gray ashes swirling around in the front seat.) But, in both cases, we were on a SCHEDULE which meant that we had to take the car we were given and go, sneezing and coughing all the way. I’m a little over six feet tall, and a lot of that six feet is leg. I do not fit in little SUVs. The one they gave us in Scottsdale left my knees stuck against the dash board. And climbing in and out of one of those isn’t my idea of a good time, either. As for the stiff ride? Bumpy. And having a warning posted on the mirror that says "This vehicle is prone to roll-overs" wasn’t very impressive, either. Believe me, there’s a good reason that men and women of a certain age tend to love "geezer cars."

But at the time it looked as though we were stuck with the one we’d been given. Then we showed up at our hotel, where the Concierge went on the offensive for us. She made multiple calls to the main airport’s car rental agency and didn’t give up until she reached a human named Lawrence. Who was happy to find us a proper geezer car. (Did you know that’s when it’s 110º you can get burned if you touch the outside of a black Lincoln Town Car? Who knew?) Not only did Lawrence find the car, he had it waiting for us the next morning. And the people there could not have been more helpful. They washed it again. They took us to the place we needed to go for the airport book signing and parked it for us in a FREE PARKING SPACE. You see, that’s the bad news about not wanting to attract all the corporate lawyers. By keeping the name anonymous, the people on the ground, the ones who deserve praise and thanks don’t get what’s coming to them right along with the thoughtless people doing the careless dispatching who need a good swift kick in the rear. (Thanks again to my mother.)

So we’re in Tucson now. In a little while I’ll go out to do today’s three major events. Tomorrow it’s even worse. Tomorrow the score is FOUR!! I’m making myself tired just thinking about it. But right now, we’re sitting in our Tucson home in air-conditioned splendor. (It did take a day to get the AC up to speed.) And why am I using my cell phone minutes for these phone calls? Because our "high speed communication package" wasn’t working when we got here. No phone. No cable TV. No high speed Internet. (The VMH [voice mail hell] score to summon help from them was a mere 24 minutes. And that was on a Sunday afternoon.) Compared to the car rental guys, the communication folks are stars when it comes to supplying prompt service.

And actually, the repair guys are great. Evidently, in our absence, some little critter decided to chew a hole in the cable. So we’re fixed now. My phone is cooling off and getting recharged. Time to wash and iron my hair, put on my face, and go sign some books.

I’ll send more tales from the book tour trail later, but I need to send this one NOW. I just got word that our High Speed Internet is up and running, and we need to post this while the posting is good. I’m sure that’s something my mother would have said if she’d ever had the opportunity.